Job du jour:
I am currently a Researcher with Kronos Incorporated where I continue to work on on machine learning and planning techniques for sequential decision making problems.

Research:
I was formerly a member of the Rutgers Labratory for Real-Life reinforcement Learning (RL3) under the direction of Dr. Michael Littman. My primary research focus is using machine learning techniques to build models of environments and behaviors for agents that need to make decisions and take actions in the real world. My dissertation research focused on representation issues for agents in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) subsection of machine learning, where an agent must efficiently learn to act optimally in an environment based on feedback. In my post-doctoral work, I have focused on problems where learning is done through observations of people or another agent's behavior, and used these techniques to train systems in a wide range of areas, including teaching robots complicated commands and electronic tutoring. My current work focuses on adapting many of these techniques to real-world problems in educational domains.

Daniel Hewlett, Thomas J. Walsh, and Paul R. Cohen. Teaching and Executing Verb Phrases In Proceedings of the First Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-Epirob-11), Frankfurt, Germany, 2011.

Also appeared at the RSS Workshop on the State of Imitation learning and the AAAI Spring Symposium on Bridging the Gaps in Human-Agent Collaboration.

Video
Here's a video of RL in action (implemented with the help of many others in the RL^3 Lab back in 2005) on a Sony Aibo trying to escape from a darkened room. Video
A webpage with more info on the task is here: Explanation